Search

This article is Part 8 of the series WCF RIA Services:

1. Getting Started with WCF RIA Services
2. Querying Data Through WCF RIA Services
3. Updating Data Through WCF RIA Services
4. WCF RIA Services and MVVM
5. Metadata Classes and Shared Code in WCF RIA Services
6. Validating Data with WCF RIA Services
7. Authenticating and Authorizing Calls in WCF RIA Services
8. Debugging and Testing WCF RIA Services Applications
9. Structuring WCF RIA Services Applications 
10. Exposing Additional Domain Service Endpoints for Other Clients

Introduction

In this article, I am going to focus on two aspects that are just as important as how to write the code – how to write the code in such a way as to be more testable, and how to debug and diagnose when your code is not doing exactly what you expect.

I was playing around and making a Silverlight game and I realized I needed to do hit detection, that is know when one object hit another. After some searching I came accross Andy Beaulieu’s blog where he writes about how to do it in a very effective way. I show how to implement Andy’s solution in this new video.

This brings the new features from the Silverlight 4 version to developers who have a business reason to continue with Silverlight 3 development for the time being:

• Updated user interface
• Integrated “tag expression” support for selecting subsets of tests to run
• Performance improvements
• Removal of dependencies on XLinq and System.Windows.Browser assemblies

The user interface no longer uses the antiquated HTML DOM bridge for displaying results, but now is a data bound, rich Silverlight application itself.

Beat Kiener has implemented a RandomProvider class to generate random values for different needs.

Currently I’m working on a large Silverlight project where we often need random values for testing purpose during UI development or unit testing.

Recently I’ve implemented a RandomProvider class to generate random values for different needs such as simple values like int, short, long, byte, DateTime, Timespan, Thickness, string as well as complex types such as words, addresses, phone numbers, company names, email adresses, names and so on.

Previously, I thought that the Navigation framework in Silverlight 3 is able to help me to index the pages in my Silverlight application. However, I was wrong. Frame and Navigation only help me to integrate with the browser hash value and it’s not related to SEO.

Therefore, I do something wise. I studied a lot about how Flash do SEO and come up a very simple solution.

Admittedly, I don’t have a single post that has an embedded Silverlight app. The root of the my problem is the lack of support for embedding Silverlight into Windows Live Writer (WLW).  It’s possible, with Wordpress, to embed Silverlight through the web interface, but WLW’s features outweigh what the web dashboard can do (namely pasting in screen shots without having to save them to the file system and then upload).

In this post Jimmy Schementi doesn't use the Silverlight unit test framework, but rather some nice dynamic language test goods. As an example he is testing a calculator on steroids.

IronRuby makes it really easy to test .NET applications because of it's .NET integration and ability to run real Ruby programs, like RSpec. However, this becomes much more difficult to do in Silverlight for a variety of reasons. And Silverlight doesn't have good options for testing to begin with, except for the Silverlight Unit Test Framework, but I yearn for something simpler. This post will show you how to test a C# Silverlight application with IronRuby, using a testing framework called Bacon, a lightweight RSpec clone.